During our Partnership Building Activity (PBA) “Bringing Europe Closer Together” in May 2022 in KulturHaus, we met Daniel Tecklenborg, the Director of CEDE Aruba. We talked about cooperation where we learn from each others best case practices, where we learn from CEDE how to lobby and advocate for funding with institutional actors and funding organizations, and CEDE will learn from NaturKultur how to build an ecosystem and know-how within the European Solidarity Corps and Erasmus + programs and provide them to the local youth and organizations.
Since then, Darko Mitevski, our NaturKultur President visited CEDE and Daniel and Xenia from CEDE visited us several times. We worked on developing a strategy of integrating the ESC and E+ programs in the 11 community centres CEDE supports and manages in Aruba, a Dutch overseas territory their headquarters.
Our goal is to transfer the know-how, systems, policies and practices that NaturKultur gathered in the last 5 years and adapt them to their local reality, support them to develop cooperation with governmental and non-governmental organizations, youth organizations, and develop infrastructure and know-how. Now we have set the strategic plan and ecosystem to offer these programs in the 11 community centres that CEDE supports and manages on the island, reaching hundreds of young people, many in rural areas. And this story is just starting to be written…. we are very excited to see how this will look 5 years from today.
In the meantime, our goal is to learn how CEDE manages to acquire funding from government institutions, different donors (Stiftung) and wider regional funding projects, for the Dutch islands.
This is one great example of how the European Youth Work Agenda and Bonn Process is being implemented internationally, among two actors in the field of youth. It would be great one day to have an institutional approach to such transfer of know-how between organizations, not just personal passion, friendship and goodwill.
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